Keystone XL pipeline

Unlike Jimmy Carter, Jim Prentice doesn't claim to be a nuclear physicist or a peanut farmer, or even to answer all his correspondence personally, and that's entirely to his credit. Just the same, Alberta's premier is being pretty economical with the truth these days, and, I don't know about you, but it’s starting to bug the heck out of me.

I mention Jimmy Carter only because of the way the one-term U.S. President was famously called out by Harper's Magazine during the 1976 presidential campaign in a then-controversial article entitled "Jimmy Carter’s Pathetic Lies."

All sensible measures considered, the president of the United States is the most powerful person in the world and is likely to remain so for a spell.

That's true even if you happen to disagree with, disapprove of or just don’t like the individual who holds the office.

Forbes Magazine, toady to the 1%, panderer to 1% wannabes and America's specialist in creating long, meaningless lists, says it's Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, but they're just trying to get up the nose of Barack Obama, whom they say is No. 2, because they don’t like Democrats in the White House very much.

How does Alberta Premier Jim Prentice get to be optimistic and pessimistic about the same thing at the same time in order to reach contradictory conclusions? Can someone explain to me how this is supposed to work?

He's pessimistic: Prentice is on record as saying repeatedly that low oil prices have punched a $6- to $7-billion hole in the provincial budget and that, as conservative politicians usually say in such circumstances, "tough choices are going to have to be made and they will be made."

Ever since the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline exploded three and half years ago, that's been the argument from the project's liberal supporters. Sure, the oil that Keystone would carry from the Alberta tar sands is three to four times more greenhouse-gas-intensive than conventional crude. But that's not on Keystone XL, we're told. Why? Because if TransCanada isn't able to build Keystone to the south, then another pipeline will be built to the west or east. Or that dirty oil will be transported by rail. But make no mistake, we have long been assured: all that carbon buried beneath Alberta's boreal forest will be mined no matter what the president decides.

After many months of pondering what U.S. President Barack Obama would do regarding the fate of this giant oily snake, and hundreds and hundreds of demonstrations by anti-pipeline activists, threats of blockades over Indigenous-held land, it turned out that the U.S. Senate was a stumbling block that stopped the pipeline.

On November 19, 2014, the Senate blocked the bill that would have seen the pipeline continue, just shy of one vote to pass at 59-41.

In a recent CBC radio interview on the politics show The House, Gary Doer, Canada's ambassador to the United States, discussed Republican gains in the recent U.S. mid-term election. He predicted that a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate will likely vote to endorse the Keystone XL pipeline by amending an energy efficiency bill. Keystone XL, if then also approved by U.S. President Barack Obama, would transport diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands south through the U.S. to Gulf Coast refineries and ports.

Don't

It was a dramatic scene in the Senate this week. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren, presiding, announced the defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline, a Crow Creek Sioux man from South Dakota sang out in the Senate gallery. A massive people's climate movement against extracting some of the dirtiest oil on the planet had prevailed ... at least for now.

It was a Democrat, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, representing oil interests, who tried to push the pipeline through. She hoped its passage would help her in the Dec. 6 runoff election against her challenger, Congressman Bill Cassidy, who sponsored a similar bill in the House. The Republicans have promised to reintroduce the bill when they take control of the Senate in January.

The Keystone XL pipeline system is, upon completion, set to run from Western Canada's tar sands into the United States to refineries in Illinois and down to the Gulf Coast of Texas. In total, the crude oil pipeline would run nearly 1,900 kilometres.

From the Gulf of Mexico, Canada's crude oil can be shipped to Asia and Europe after the U.S. buys its share.

In the midterm elections in the United States, the Republicans won the majority of seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives -- for the first time in eight years.

You know that's not a good thing when Harper's employment minister Jason Kenney tweets, "Good news for Canadian jobs & economy. It looks like the new US Senate will have the 60+ votes needed to ensure that Keystone XL is approved."

It is no longer a metaphor when we say Alberta's conservative politicians are performing miracles and wonders.

Leastways, yesterday, Premier Jim Prentice announced his intention to perform an actual, literal miracle -- to create 230 new schools in five years, which is a rate of very close to one new school every week!

That's a miracle if you ask me, even with a price tag of $2 billion, which is what Prentice's Progressive Conservative government says it's going to spend on making this happen.